Once they have been removed from the core of a nuclear reactor, the irradiated fuel arrays are placed in a deactivating pool and stored there for a certain time. During this period, a certain number of checks are carried out on the clusters of rods constituting the arrays, in order to gain further knowledge of the behavior of the fuel during its irradiation. For the same purpose, another operation to which the invention applies consists in removing and collecting the deposit formed, during the irradiation, on certain zones of the rods located at the periphery of the fuel arrays. It is in fact of value to be able subsequently to analyze (off site) the nature of this deposit and to determine its amount.
The devices used to date and described, for example, in the article published in May 1976 in "NUCLEAR TECHNOLOGY" (page 166) are essentially manual devices: a scraping head at the end of a manually operated pole. No biological protection is provided in the system itself, which leads to handling difficulties both technically and in terms of regulations.